The once-thought-future-project of the interchangeable smartphone called Project Ara is coming a lot sooner than than you might think. According to Harry McCracken over at Time spent some time talking w/ the heads over at Google’s (ATAP) Advanced Technology And Project group and got more details on what to expect from what could be the future of smartphones. Having just announced developer conferences for Ara, we can expect consumer sales by early next year.
While these devices will have swappable components, that doesn’t mean we should only expect one. There will be multiple devices coming from Ara arriving in mini, medium, and jumbo sizes. The 1st will be a budget-friendly $50 devices sporting Wi-Fi w/ no cellular radios (3G/4G/LTE) on-board. But it act as a base in which consumers can add more components/features to beef it up.
“Furthermore, the Ara platform is designed to permit hot-swapping of modules, without requiring you to power down the phone — which means that you could slide out the camera and replace it with a battery whenever you needed a little extra juice.”
Of course depending on the price, some Ara devices will be more customizable than others. Google will be the sole manufacturer of the base motherboards as a variety of OEMs will provide the interchangeable components. Speaking of which, the shells will work w/ 3D printers to further customize the device’s material.
When Motorola was sold to Lenovo, they didn’t leave w/ their Project Ara. Google kept it as they had bigger plans for it. If you were Google. you would hold on to Motorola’s ATAP too.
